We are in the middle of the transition and if I had it to do over again I would have waited until the summer just so it would have been smoother. I'm doing small group at a time keeping exchange up along with gmail. The biggest issue with this is since I haven't switched the MX record over to gmail because of the staff that are still on exchange, I have to set up forwarders for the gmail clients in exchange. Not a major issue, but a minor hassle.

There is a learning curve as to be expected, but it is small. I definitely would suggest using chrome with the mail checker plus and calendar checker plugin. One issue that we found is many staff members would use the send a link via email in the right click on in explorer and it would want to open outlook for the mail. So we had to train them to use the feature in mail checker plus for sending links.

The teachers that are using google docs for student assignments love it and so do the students. I plan on using them to do some train the trainer sessions with the other staff this fall.

I have found that the mail migration tool for exchange isn't perfect. So I limit the number I migrate at on time to groups of five, but you can have more than one running at a time so I do 3. Do I do have 15 at once going. More than that and I get errors for some reason.

One of the biggest challenge is to get them to start thinking in terms of collaborative work with the calendar and docs. they want to email attachments instead of sharing in docs or send meeting times in e-mail bodies instead of shared calendar or meeting invites. That we will overcome with time and training.

All in all it has been a fairly easy migration. Like I said, if I had to do it over again I would have done the migration over the summer, setup generic password for first time login, trained them on how to get in and started with it and then migrated their mail from exchange over afterwards.

18 Replies

We switched the beginning of this school year and for the most part it transitioned very nicely. We do not see many people using the productivity part of it like google docs or anything yet but the Calenders have been a big hit. There are some people who insisted to keep using Microsoft Office but really very few people did. The contact list is more of less always up to date. I know the IT staff and myself included make full use of the google docs and we are looking to encourage the teachers and staff to do the same because if we can get them using that then maybe we wont need to buy office anymore or worry about upgrading people to the latest version because someone sends out files in .docx that most people can not open.

One more thing. Google's password captcha is very difficult to read and type even for myself. That tends to be annoying if someone locks themselves by typing the wrong password too many times or when you first create them an account and they have to make there own password.

We are in the middle of the transition and if I had it to do over again I would have waited until the summer just so it would have been smoother. I'm doing small group at a time keeping exchange up along with gmail. The biggest issue with this is since I haven't switched the MX record over to gmail because of the staff that are still on exchange, I have to set up forwarders for the gmail clients in exchange. Not a major issue, but a minor hassle.

There is a learning curve as to be expected, but it is small. I definitely would suggest using chrome with the mail checker plus and calendar checker plugin. One issue that we found is many staff members would use the send a link via email in the right click on in explorer and it would want to open outlook for the mail. So we had to train them to use the feature in mail checker plus for sending links.

The teachers that are using google docs for student assignments love it and so do the students. I plan on using them to do some train the trainer sessions with the other staff this fall.

I have found that the mail migration tool for exchange isn't perfect. So I limit the number I migrate at on time to groups of five, but you can have more than one running at a time so I do 3. Do I do have 15 at once going. More than that and I get errors for some reason.

One of the biggest challenge is to get them to start thinking in terms of collaborative work with the calendar and docs. they want to email attachments instead of sharing in docs or send meeting times in e-mail bodies instead of shared calendar or meeting invites. That we will overcome with time and training.

All in all it has been a fairly easy migration. Like I said, if I had to do it over again I would have done the migration over the summer, setup generic password for first time login, trained them on how to get in and started with it and then migrated their mail from exchange over afterwards.

We use it here and it's been a big success. We're a new school, so we didn't transition from anything -- we just started with Google Apps. Everyone here *loves* using it. The interface is so easy, and everything is so well-thought-out that I've hardly ever had to do any training or support on it. We get so-so use out of Google Docs. It gets used for a lot of things here, but most folks complain about how it isn't as good or powerful as MS Office. On the whole though, it's become a part of many work-processes. Teachers haven't really done much with it from a class perspective. We may push more on that next year. One thing I get a *LOT* of use out of is Sites. I've developed a system of "portals" for different groups -- we have a student portal, faculty portal, parent portal, work-study portal, board portal, etc. Sites is fairly limited in some ways, but if you can work around those limitations, it's a useful tool.

The drawbacks are largely in the administrative side. "Support" is almost non-existent, and the administrator tools are pretty poor. I've been with it for 2.5 years and it's gotten better, but there are still lots of holes or missing features. There's also a lot of ways where your options are highly limited. A recent example is that I have a user who ran out of space in her mailbox. I can't buy more space for her, so we had to come up with a solution. In the end, what we did is created a new email account for archiving, copied all her mail to that account, then deleted 2008 and 2009 email from her primary account. If she needs old mails, she can log into the archive account. It's not an ideal solution, but for us that seemed like the best option. But the thing is, if I had a way of buying more space, I'd have just done that. It's not an option though, and you'll find little annoyances like that all-around, the longer you use Google Apps.

One other thing that's both good and bad is mobile device support. The good thing is that since it's basically Gmail, there are lots of ways it can work for lots of devices. The bad thing is that some devices work better than others. I've found Android devices are far and away the best when it comes to email and calendar -- just about every feature of the web client is available in the phone's apps. iPhones work okay -- the mail app doesn't do all that Gmail can, and the calendar app is very limited when it comes to syncing multiple calendars. There are iOS apps to help with some of this, but I prefer the web clients built for iOS devices the best. Blackberries are generally poor, in my experience. Now I have not set up a BES server, so that will be part of it, but we're switching to Android phones in a few months so I'm not worrying about it.

Live@EDU is another good option. We're in a tough situation because we need to change our primary domain (LONG story), and the only way to do that in Google Apps is to create an entirely new instance of it and migrate your data over. Since I have to go through all the trouble of migrating data, I figure it's a good time to evaluate my options. There's a lot to like about Live@EDU, but the benefit is largely for administrators. The user interface is not as good as Google Apps (although it's gotten / getting better). My informal polling of people here is that they love Google Apps, and don't want to use anything else, but I haven't done any formal testing. I've played around with writing mail, doing calendars, etc. on Live@EDU, and I prefer Gmail as well, so it's most likely we'll stick with it.

What I'm envisioning using Google Apps for Education for here in my district is, well, everything.

I want to use the mail for our email solution, docs for our productivity suite, pages for our website (every one of our teachers has a site plus the board, admins and other pages)... I guess I basically want to make Google my front-end solution for everything.

also, i wonder what the story would be about the freedom of information act.

right now, if a teacher gets FOI'd, we check with the admins and attorneys that it is legit. then we have to provide a copy of all email correspondence with school owned email account to whoever is asking.

Google Apps for Education customers can add Message Discovery for all users, or can add Message Security for all users and Archive & Discovery for some.

We often see faculty and staff being setup with extended retention (up to 10 years) and students setup with 1 year retention. The thought process being that faculty/staff emails are subject to retention, FOIA and "sunshine" laws, and that student emails should be retained for policy and disciplinary enforcement, as well as compliance with bullying laws.

For K-12 schools, GMS is currently free and the AD1 and AD10 products are available at steep discounts (~66%), which helps mitigate the costs substantially.

If you go with the above retention strategy, you will need two domains -- one for faculty/staff (school.edu) and one for students (ie, student.school.edu). The added benefit of the dual domain environment is that it minimized the risk of faculty and staff accidentally sharing information with students.

Again, thank you for all your input. I just spent the last couple hours with our Principal, Superintendent and BA going over this whole idea. They are all on board with it (especially the BA... its mostly FREE and saves on our current hosted solutions). I plan to implement the changes over summer break... I'm sure I could handle the all the technical side changes myself in a day or two (with exception to MX records updating... cant control how long that takes) but I doubt my staff can handle a whole new email, calendar, productivity suite and website system this close to the end of the school year. I think a September launch will work best and allow me to give proper training to everybody the give the extra help to the ones who need it.

As you see above I am planning to go all out with Google Apps for Education... email, calendar, productivity, website and I plan to custom develop a grade book app for my teachers (i will of course share it once its done) as well as contact our SIS company to work with them for integration into Google Apps. Because of all this I plan on keeping a detailed log / journal of everything and putting together a very detailed "How To" here on SpiceWorks.

I help with a small, k-8th school - used GA 2 years now with Gaggle.net on top. Faculty & staff use GA, but students only access via the Gaggle.net interface. Very reasonable, adds content filtering of student's email, chats, social wall (like FaceBook), homework dropboxes - incorporates Zoho docs (also monitored) and has archiving at reasonable cost. Can control students contacts (same grade, same school, teachers only, etc.)

You're probably looking for more anecdotal responses, but even many of the largest, well-known universities are in the fact-finding phase, or have already begun or completed migration to Google Apps, including:

Like Matthew, we did a phased in approach as opposed to a complete rollover. We have now been operating fully with Google Apps for Education for over a year. We are currently using for both staff and students.

Our transition was quite seamless to be honest. We didn't have any big issues at all and once the transition was complete, we disabled our old mail system. We have been pushing the integration of all of the Apps (Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Sites, etc.) with all of our teachers and they are getting on board and using it interactively with their students, which the students are loving. The best part is they can access it from anywhere! Also, the SLA is huge for us because we don't have to worry about maintaining internal servers to offer such a high quality service.

I've found technical support to be very helpful. Education users have access to full tech support (phone and email) just like Business edition customers.

A fairly big challenge for us is 're-training' the way our teachers and students think. When they think of word processing, they immediately think of Microsoft Word. When they think of presentations, they immediately think of Microsoft Powerpoint...etc, etc. Microsoft has done a great job of these products, however, they have also monopolized the market for a long, long time. We have found that 90-95% of our staff and students use only the basic functionality of a word processor or presentation software. So it's been a bit of a challenge to convince them that Google Docs is so much more because of the collaboration, sharing, etc. and not have them always opt to use MS Office. They're getting better at it though. We've pushed them to use it (probably without them knowing hehe) by forcing all teachers to submit their lunch counts via a Google Form :) They love the form because it's quick and simple and so much easier than the previous method.

So all in all, we love using Google Apps for Education. My administration especially loves it because of the price. We've opted into the Message Discovery and Archiving and that is very inexpensive also.

Excellent topic! I know alot of K-12 Districts in this area are in process of using or are using GA which I have assisted on at least with the DNS stuff. The ones that are using it are doing it mainly in small areas first and areas like New Tech High. With the advent of MS@Live and MS Mobile Office it will be interesting on how GA plays out over the next year. Super_J-Looking forward to that How To..!:->

0

This topic has been locked by an administrator and is no longer open for commenting.